KOLOSSAL

2017

Performance and temporary installation

Z-Bridge, Pune Biennale, India

Some large pink shells, theones of the Strombus species, are approached to the public’s ears by the museum’s staff,
giving to the visitors the opportunity to hear the sound of the sea directly from their hands.
This is a simple gesture, familiar to everyone, a gift that can be traced back to a common and collective memory. The
evocation of an intimate sound, of an element present in everyone’s life and easily recognisable, even if invisible: water.

The protagonists of this performance, which took place in the narrow corridor of Raffaella Cortese gallery, are roses sellers from Bangladesh, now living in Milan. The sellers stand on their feet on lined-up stools which become precarious pedestals and contribute on giving them both a sculptural and sacral presence. From their nomadic dimension they are moved on to a static one. The proximity of their bodies with the audience, invited to inhabit the narrow corridor space, creates a dialogue. Roses bushes in their hands give shape to a hanging rose garden; the roses draw a line across the space filling the environment with their scent.

A complex itinerant work made up of elements that allude to spontaneous forms of aggregation in public spaces. It consists of a large market-stand tent and hundreds little mirrors with plastic frames hanging from raffia cords. Around
the tent, four cars are parked, their headlights are switched on and their radios are playing loud music. As a result, the soundtracks overlap and mash-up. Each element chosen by the artist becomes an important piece of the little amusement park, where “architectures
and people” converge together without
establishing new hierarchies. Circus represents a new center “linked to the
city, its changes are influenced by life and time”.

The video documents a series of interviews carried out in via Padova, a main street in an area which is a home to a large Arab community in Milan.
The passers-by are asked to express their opinions about subjects such as love and memory. Recorded frontally,
each of them holds a yellow melon in his hands: a recurring element and colorful spot with pseudo-exotic features which is present in every shot. The
editing with cyclic sequences creates a poetic multiethnic narration that describes the social and urban territory here and now, juxtaposing it to the intimate and distant territory of everybody’s ideas and dreams.

An out-of-service car is placed in the center of the gallery. Its presence recalls the idea of the end of a journey, an experience, an absence of voices, bodies, actions. The object exhibited contrasts with the video image projected in front of it: the car’s headlamps project images, like in a dream. These visions show an urban performance shot in the desert and silent suburbs of Florence, with some young boys doing handstands in front of closed shops shutters. The noise of their feet hitting the metal surface comes from two loudspeakers placed on the back seat of the car. The sound of the boys hitting the shutters recall street shows and civil insurrections.

This series of photos take configuration as a depiction of Milan central station urban social scape. Groups of immigrants gathering there, using those spaces as
their meeting point, are
portrayed as elegant aristocrats holding coloured Karate belts. They pose in the frame as renaissance celebrities adorned with colorful drapes giving birth to an
uncanny oniric neo realism.

In this photograph Maloberti stands in the middle of his living room. The dining table has been dismissed, and the artist, along with his family, is occupying the center of the space. The owners of the house stand still and in a royal position, an image that almost reminds of some metaphysical mannequins;
in this way they are becoming
the main characters of this work.
The black and white image, the furniture in the room, the white light entering from the window, everything reminds of a Neorealist aesthetics. With a work which reveals a moment of shared intimacy with the observer, the artist aims to show the relationship between objects
and people, trying to describe domestic reality and country life.

The photograph shows Maloberti’s mother and grandmother wearing a red and white checkered tunic. The two figures create a surreal portrait. The result is both disturbing and sweet, just like memory. The frontal pose of the women’s faces, the magnetism in their gazes recall a shrunken ironic plot. Right below the
photograph, a large square table cloth lays on the floor; a round hole in the middle of the tunic shows a glimpse of a pillow. Seen from above, these objects turn into a perceptual vertigo,
in a threshold-bed towards
a dream-like reality.

Marcello Maloberti’s
grandmother is crouched
– like a little girl – under the kitchen table. As a rural and
primitive architecture, the table
symbolizes a temporary shelter, built as a defense from an invisible threat. The sweetnessof the image, characterized by a mixture of disturbing anguish
and dream-like poetry, recalls neo-realistic aesthetics and reveals emotions and familial details. The motionless moment has the narrative power of a prolonged time span. Casa can be considered an ante litteram
work in Maloberti’s career.

Foreign passengers have been spied with a camera on Milano’s subway. The voyeuristic eye focuses on their faces and tries to catch the breaths through
long lasting still shots and somatic details. The sequences are shown on monitors placed
on furnitures inside a shop in the Milanese subway. The
time-space dimension of this installation is suspended, it turns into an investigation about
social and urban issues.

In this performance a graphic
yet abstract sign redesigns the space. The architecture disappears, leaving only the red line of an hotel hallway which becomes the scene of this static frame, where humans become sculptural matter. A lying performer holds a walkman in
her hands and the public,
wearing headphones, listens to the played nursery rhymes, becoming the artwork itself, in
an equilibrium between
theatre and tableau vivant.

Masking tape fragments cover a concrete outdoor surface. An obsessive and maniacal gesture that modifies the surface
shaping an artificial landscape. The fragments by giving some sort of softness and fragility to the space both compose new shapes and change the light perception. It is a precarious installation which will perish through the course of the time.

Five dancers are linked to the
wall of the Bocconi University
building in Milan by means of red belts around their waists; they lean on them with their weight, forming a 30° angle between
their bodies and the sidewalk. The visual impact of the performance is that of a still, redesigning the space as if it was an additional graphic sign. For passers-by,
this performance is a sort of moment of time suspension dissociated from reality.

The motionless performers
stand in front of checkered blankets hanging on the wall,
with their gazes lost in the space. Each of them has a walkman connected with two
loudspeakers playing recordings of people’s little talks on public transports. The voices overlap and intertwine creating
imaginary conversations and
figures. The chaos produced resounds in the empty room, changing constantly. The static nature of the human figures is juxtaposed to the dynamism of the words, determining a destabilizing visual and conceptual short circuit.

Four inhabitants of the small
town of Casalpusterlengo hold checkered blankets in front of their bodies. The woolen
surfaces create a nomad and precarious room. The ephemeral volume interacts with the surrounding urban space, giving birth to new and multiple landscape sequences.

This photographic series portrays the customers of an Arabian barber’s shop in Milan. The men portrayed while posing in front of the camera evoke hieratic figures of dynastic paintings. The red cloth –
element of the ordinary working day – becomes a sort of ecclesiastic
or celebratory investiture, which gives a noble aura to the portrayed men.

A group of inhabitants of Rome crowd up on one side of the
room to build a small human pyramid. The wall made of
bodies covers the loudspeakers playing sounds of dives into the water.
The sound creates an absent
and dynamic image in contrast
to the silence and the stillness of the bodies. The gallery room becomes an abstract reality,
filled with a strong sense of inertia.

A complex itinerant work made up of elements that allude to spontaneous forms of aggregation in public spaces. It consists of a large market-stand tent and hundreds little mirrors with plastic frames hanging from raffia cords. Around the tent, four cars are parked, their headlights are switched on and their radios are playing loud music. As a result, the soundtracks overlap and mash- up. Each element chosen by the artist becomes an important piece of the little amusement park, where “architectures and people” converge without establishing new hierarchies. C.I.R.C.U.S. represents a new center “linked to the city, its changes are influenced by life and time”.

A teenager is sitting on the step of the exhibition space entrance cutting out images from magazines and leaving them on the stairs. Picture fragments cover the floor, while visitors constantly change the distribution of the pieces; a work in progress takes place transforming the surface into a visual and dizzy chaos.

Six performers went from via Col di Lana 8 to San Siro Stadium in Milan on foot and by tram, carrying on their heads some sculptures made of piled objects and pocket radios – parodying street sellers. The pop music spread by these radios formed a sort of “cacophonic” soundtrack for the performance. The combination of music and visual elements provokes uncommon reactions in a transformed ordinary context. The performance has been realized for the event Circular by Domus.

The photograph portrays Marcello Maloberti hanging on the road sign marking the entrance to Casalpusterlengo, the artist’s home town. In an act of physical resistance, the artist simulates a constant precariousness and his devotion to precise socio-cultural roots. In the photograph, the two-dimensionality of the road sign juxtaposes to the surrounding bucolic landscape. The unreal image evokes a profane fall from heaven.

Twenty young men from India
are standing in the entrance hall of the Spazio Oberdan in Milan.
They hold bunches of red roses with raffia threads and colored pencils tied
to them, hanging from the stems like unnatural roots. The work asks the public to enter this floral and human architecture, smelling the heady scent of the roses.

In Raffaella Cortese’s Gallery in Milan a collective situation creates a narration device characterized by unpredictability. Tagadà comes from the overlapping of different languages, it is the sum of various situations that come to life at the same time, with no stage nor a unique point of view. The
exhibition originates from a dialog between objects: a porcelain tiger, a checkered table cloth, some magazine cuttings, whirling lights, safety pins, melons and pineapples; in the meantime, a child rides a motorbike through the exhibition space, wearing a helmet
covered with white shells. A wide range of images and perceptive stimuli mix with the music composed by Igor Muroni. This extraordinary jumble produces a particular energy characterized by chromatic and kinetic disorder. Tagadà is the name of a merry-go-round very popular in the 90s.

A group of teenagers stands in front of the entrance to the exhibition palace. A young boy runs and jumps surrounded by
his peers, who throw bangers at his feet. Explosions and light
trails burst into the peaceful atmosphere of the art night event. The performance,
inspired by comics, transforms
an everyday gesture of game-surprise-fear into art.

Raptus is a huge installation made of objects, sounds, lights and images that creates a number of rural, urban and
human landscapes set on each other like Chinese boxes, each one expanding itself to dominate the exhibition space. The public space becomes some sort of psychological portrait: the inner dimension of a person invades the landscape and projects itself onto it. Most of the exhibited works are produced with collage technique, which is seen not only as a technique, but also as a way to act in a reality that is the result of a taking and drawing-up
action.

Several collages of juxtaposed clippings are fixed with screws
on wood tablets. The images produced by visual combinations and associations create paradoxical worlds pervaded by an unsettling horror vacui. The juxtaposition of clippings gives new life to the subjects represented. The layering of the collages recalls the form of an architecture: the images seem
to engage in a constant competition to emerge, and mark a space for themselves in the visual area set up by Maloberti.

The Performance, conceived for Performa 09, started with a collective dance led by a performer that involved a group of inexperienced clumsy
dancers. The Romanian folk music and the yellow melons evoke an exotic image, contrasting with the city’s background. The dance performance includes camping and spread settlement in the metropolitan public space.

A miscellaneous group of characters marchs around the district, wearing colors and sculptures. The performers bodies become itinerant buildings. The combination between figures and objects creates extemporary skylines. The performance hides itself, blends and emerges
continuously among the citizens. The parade produces an unexpected invasion of the
Anton Kern gallery.

An intimate portrait of the artist standing at the window of a room in the Chelsea Hotel, in New York City. He rented the room just for one night, to take this picture.
The artist – dressed in black with a viking helmet on his head – becomes part of the hotel
room’s portrait, in which daily life and melancholy battle each
other.

Fifteen people stand in line holding fifteen porcelain tigers above their heads. A minute later they let the tigers fall and crash on the ground. A silent and
empty space is instantaneously overwhelmed by a deafening noise and covered by a whole multitude of porcelain fragments. An animated fridge moves through a small adjacent room like a mysterious domestic specter. In the entrance hall a kid cuts hundreds of paper knives from magazines and the whole room becomes a deep lake of blades.

A black and a white skin soldier, members of the Italian alpine troops, move on all fours inside the space of Zero Gallery and the Marconi Studio. Both of them wear the official olive-green uniform. The performance is a determined sign, a tacit and wild gesture. It is an invasion into new territory for Marcello. The Italian spirit, the image of the nation is seen in an ironic and bittersweet way. The way the two people move is a futile attempt to avoid being seen. The Alpinos try hard to hide behind an invisible trench, they do it no matter what, it’s a matter of honor, a serious game, perpetual war.

Tarzan Noir is a performance that took place during the 10th Nuit Blanche in
Paris. Starting from Brétigny – seat of the Centre d’Art Contemporain -, a group of people traveled to the Capital by RER
train and metro, carrying thirty-five porcelain tigers, which got deposited in the Arènes de Montmartre at the end of the journey. At the same time of the event’s launch, the performers lifted the sculptures and smashed them on the ground. In this work, the artist focuses
on the theme of traveling by public transports through the urban pattern,
that we can find in some of his earliest works. At the same time, the impetuousness of the gestures makes Tarzan Noir an undeniable political action of re-appropriation and
re-territorialization of public spaces.

Amado mio is a temporary monument in which the artist’s body becomes a dynamic and unexpected landscape. The beach towel is a
two-dimensional surface that evokes an exotic scenario, juxtaposed to the context in which the action takes place: the cave of Trescore Balneario. The base of the installation is characterized by an irregular shape that creates a condition
of constant instability in which the artist-performer finds
himself, highlighting the momentary nature of the work.

Its proximity in the exhibition space to other monumental works by the artist lends this small-scale installation the role of a thematic and spatial counterpoint. Subtle but meaningful correspondences link it to other works in the exhibition: the little suns here plummeting into a photographic sea after having been cut
by the artist into a series of rather hackneyed picture postcards recall the panthers in Blitz smashed into shards on the floor. The Egyptian cigarette packs form a figurative and material horizon, balancing the vertical thrust of Sim Sala Bim, and gives life to an unexpectedly
(and deceptively) romantic panorama.
With this never-before-exhibited work, Maloberti uses exotic references and clichés to allude to recent political events (the uprising in Egypt in 2011) and, more
in general, to the function of cultural stereotypes in the creation of models of identity and recognizability.

During the inaugural evening at MACRO,twenty-five performers destroyed twenty-five life sized black ceramic panthers – mass-produced, kitsch objects – after keeping them lifted above their heads for one minute. The short but intense action made the public experience a physical and emotional climax, culminating in the resounding crash of the ceramic panthers. The audience was also given the possibility to become an integral
part of the performance by stepping on the shards or picking them for themselves, a situation that had already occurred previously in other Maloberti’s works such as Tarzan Noir (2011). In this performance, as in Maloberti’s latest works, iconic images and real explosions of energy are created and combined with the capacity of penetrating allegorical resonances and “political” potentials:
the panthers’ destruction parallels the break of every boundary between the art scene and existence, between symbolic force and material resistance, between distance and engagement.

A child sits on the ground, absorbed in the act of cutting pictures – that he drops on the floor – from a series of glossy magazines, introducing “the modernist principle of collage into a sphere of everyday life”. The performance takes place at the entrance of an exhibition space which is invaded by hundreds of cut-out images the position of which is constantly changed by the incessant passage of visitors.

Giorgio de Chirico’s bed gives to the artist the possibility to act
the part of the absent master.
During this dream, Marcello Maloberti establishes a psychological contact that reveals the dreamlike power of the performance.

‘Sommerfugle spiser bananer (THE END)’ is a performance staged at Amagertorv square during the Copenhagen Art Festival. The event features 24 performers. Each one carries a big porcelain tiger while moving through the city on foot or by public transports. Once they
have reached Amagertorv
square they line up undressed and, after receiving Maloberti’s command, smash the tigers on the ground. This performance gives to the artist the possibility to emphasize, in a provocative way, the wild essence of some symbols that live in apparent contradiction.

‘La voglia matta’ is the allegory
of a multiform square dominated by a large monument, a Carrara marble boulder placed in the centre of the space. Fifty-five sculptures called “Bolidi”- wooden tables that represent “dynamic architectures”-,
inspired by the modernist period, are arranged around the boulder.
The sculptures, are sustained by fifty-five performers that form a sort of fragmentary and fragile army. Moreover, the sculptures define in an abstract way the volubility of an imaginary and unstable city. The diversity of the faces of the performers, of their bodies and material elements,
the impossibility to freeze up the scene, contributes to create a scenario in constant evolution.
At the center of the performance, the majestic Carrara marble constitutes the base of an ideal room, a parallelepiped made of four beach towels sustained by an equal number of performers. The beach towels depict an exotic self-propelled scenery, whose changes are due to the material that constitutes the towels. The performers, stooping and getting up, transform the essence itself of the monument, subverting the traditional
stillness of the institutional
works of art. The performers movement is an ode to the sun, that ceases only when they leave the scene. ‘La voglia matta’ represents the unavoidable preponderance of chaos, even
in a minimalistic context.

This collection of photographs recalls various steps of the creation of Maloberti’s project
for the 55th contemporary visual art exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Different characters, object’s fragments, sculptures
and visions overlap and join to create a set of different perceptions and coral point of views. The abstract portable sculptures contrast with the portraits of young artists
who were taking part in the performance.

“Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” is a verse from the biblical Canticle of Songs of Solomon. Maloberti chose it as the title for the small “garden of delights” he created on the terraces of the Centro Zegna, his first permanent public work. ‘Kisses Sweeter
Than Wine’ occupies the previously neglected area of the old bocce courts: a familiar place to many inhabitants of Trivero. This location was suggested to the artist by the members of
local associations with whom he collaborated, not only to create the installation, but also to organize the collective performance which celebrated
its inauguration. Maloberti also involved in the project the students and teachers of the primary schools in Ronco. The garden includes several elements; the most visible one is a monumental writing on the wall (over thirty meter long), spelling out in concrete the work’s title, taking inspiration from the font used for the original center’s signs. The most charming one is a rose garden with fifteen varieties of white flowers. Furthermore, there are ornamental fruit trees; a set of tables designed by the artist; a fragment of a stage illuminated by colourful light bulbs and a half-moon neon sign. The space is meant to be enjoyed by the
whole community of the center.

The performance aims to
develop a dynamic relationship between five movable sculptures and the visitors of the fair. Each
sculpture is carried by a young artist and consists of an unusually shaped raw wooden table. A dwarf cypress is placed on each table. Introducing an uncommon, natural presence in an indoor context, the tables acquire a new function: they become poetic platforms, terrestrial islands able to establish symbolic fusions between the performers and the natural elements that they carry. The evolution of the
performance depends on the interaction between the visitors and the performers. They move through the fair space, from time to time interrupting their path, carrying an Italian national flag ironically extended with a pizzeria tablecloth, as if it was a chinese dragon.

The brick installation is
constructed in order to do push-ups. While exercising, the performer becomes a dynamic sculpture, an “animated
statue”, which creates an ideal connection with Marini’s figurative sculptures. On the bricks the artist has written three french words: “Messe en français”. These three words recall a picture shown in a 70s issue of National Geographic magazine about french colonialism. The photograph portrayed the staircase of a church, on which were written
the three words. These words
can also be linked to a famous Pasolini’s speech, in which the italian writer described the incapability of French people to recognize the habits of the African immigrants of the 20th century.

Marcello marks an apparent surrender of the artist to the image. Maloberti decides to create a new piece within his artistic path by exploring the imaginative power of words,
their capacity to compensate for the lack of images, creating a set in constant evolution. The artist makes a minimal optical intervention, with four table-sculptures placed
asymmetrically, in front of a large neon writing that stands on the wall as a kind of textual horizon. On each table are placed many books: ideal archives of suggestions, onomatopoeic words, rapid anecdotes, desires and moments of dizziness, titles of the exhibitions that have already taken place or still wait
to be performed.

The work is a huge collage in which the Italian magazine
Airone – corresponding to National Geographic – becomes
a palette of colors and images. The result is a mosaic made
up of many little windows,
creating perceptual chaos and conveying the idea of shapelessness. The magazine’s cuttings, taped on paper, are used as small pieces
of the mosaic. A new geography, made up of different and
multiple puncti in a wide collection of images, is created by the overlapping of precious details.

Drawings, collages and notes mixed together to create a sort
of first step of the artist’s work.
A pamphlet of future works and visions that makes up a whole imaginary world through a happy and spontaneous sign enriched by some keywords, like in a stream of consciousness.
These overlapping
signs and different energies create a precious compote of marmalades in Maloberti’s
artistic research.

The work draws inspiration from
a previous work of the artist,Kasalpusterlengo, 2006
[lambda print 50 x 35 cm], a photograph that portrays Marcello hanging from the welcome sign ofCasalpusterlengo, his hometown,
underlining the importance of his origins. For this installation,
the welcome sign has been completely subverted, cement blocks at the base included, from the ground it used to belong to. By removing the welcome sign from its original place, the
artist has the possibility to move the borders which it originally
was delimiting: the welcome sign brings the dreamy province in
the center of Milan and creates
a gate to new geographies. The length of the text written on the sign, ‘Casalpusterlengo’, recalls the idea of an alphabet, but represents a manifesto of the artist’s work as well, a manifesto that Marcello would like to carry around to other cities, in Italy
and abroad.

The work Brixia is installed in Brescia’s subway station, Stazione FS, between the two escalators. It has been placed there to make people heading downstairs see the normal text ‘BRESCIA’, and to make those who are going upstairs see a mirrored text crossed by a red line. The idea to put the road
sign upside-down comes from the artist’s desire to ideally
represent a second city growing under the ground, like an ancient archaeological city. Like two mirrored cities, one developed
on the surface, the other one under the ground. The
sculpture-object, hanging from the ceiling like a chandelier and cutting the space horizontally, creates an attractive and
puzzling punctum for people.

Through gestural and spontaneous neon writing, as
if it was a commercial sign, Maloberti highlights the religious contradictions of our time. He takes an hebraic word, found both in christian culture
– with the meaning of “I truly tell you” – and in islamic culture –
with the meaning of “So be it” -,
and gives it a pop look, in order
to emphasize a word that
connects different cultures.

Metal Panic is an original performance purposely conceived and realized for Bologna. In a four meters wide
street, a twenty-four meters long iron pipe, with a diameter of nine centimeters, is raised by both amateur and professional strongmen with a gesture of lifting a line in a minimal horizon. After a minute of tension between high and low, the performance will resolve unpredictably. A human architecture for a homemade horror. “Modern Horizon of Modern Iron”. An inaugural gesture, shamelessly unproductive, like all ribbon cuttings, at the entrance of
Raum, meticulously prepared, made with reckless effort and dangerously consumed in a
flash.

For the opening of the Quadriennale
d’Arte di Roma, a small stage is placed in the center of the circular room at the entrance of Palazzo delle Esposizioni. During the key moment of the vernissage, Ninetto Davoli, the iconic actor of Pier Paolo Pasolini movies, walks on the stage wearing an elegant black tuxedo. The stage where people can see the famous actor can accommodate just one extra person. The public is able, one person at the time, to get on the stage where Ninetto Davoli will give an elegantbaciamano (a kiss on the hand).
The inspiration source for the performance comes from a sketch-performance by Luciano Fabro, who kissed the hand of the art critic Carla
Lonzi. For an hour Ninetto Davoli will represent Rome and its allure, welcoming and greeting with his refined baciamano the public at the Quadriennale d’arte.

A boy sitting on the ground is cutting images of sculptures out of a series of books about Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Aztec and Etruscan art. Later he abandons them on the floor already covered with scraps. Settled within the exhibition centre of the Quadriennale di Roma, this performance results
in hundreds of images invading
a transit space, where the incessant passage of visitors constantly modifies the position of the scraps, bringing to life a huge visual assemblage in continuous evolution, as if it was a contemporary archaeological site. The cropping gesture rebuilds a memory mixing and blending places, times and different cultures.

A boy from the Modern school
of Pune sitting on the ground is cutting images of sculpturesfrom all over the world out of a series of books. Later he abandons them on the floor already covered with scraps.
Settled within one of the classroom of the school, this performance results in hundreds of images invading a transit space, where the incessant passage of visitors constantly modifies the position of the scraps, bringing to life a huge visual assemblage in continuous evolution, as if it was a contemporary archeological site. The cropping gesture rebuilds a memory mixing and blending places, times and different cultures.

A boom lift elevates a palm tree while the famous Italian melodic song of the ‘50 “Nel blu dipinto di blu (Volare)” is played by a local brass band. Standing high in the sky like a precarious monumental obelisk, the palm tree, symbol
of exoticism, mixes with the vernacular aspect of the band and with the italian nostalgicmelodic song creating a
mash-up, typical of Maloberti’s alphabet. Kolossal stands as cohabitation of different cultural signs strategically located on a
junction of different roads and bridges. The action works asa temporary landmark in the urban context as well as the conclusion of the itinerary ofthe Biennale.